How to Restart Your Animal Crossing: New Horizons Island

If you’re looking to restart your Animal Crossing: New Horizons island, there are a few steps you need to take first. Unlike most games, you can’t simply have multiple save games and islands on the same console. Animal Crossing: New Horizons only supports one island per Nintendo Switch or Nintendo Switch 2 console.

You would expect a simple button that says delete your island or start a new island, but sadly Animal Crossing: New Horizons doesn’t make starting a new island that simple.

Can You Use Another Account?

If you want to restart Animal Crossing: New Horizons without deleting your current island, creating another Nintendo Account on the same console won’t give you a new island.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons only allows one island per Nintendo Switch or Nintendo Switch 2 console. Any additional users on the same console will join the existing island as another resident instead of creating a new one.

If you want to have more than one completely separate island, you’ll need another console.

Restarting Animal Crossing: New Horizons on the First Day

If you’re still going through the first-day tutorial, but you’ve decided that you want a new island, perhaps you simply don’t like the layout of your current island or the fruit that grows on it, there’s an easy way to restart the game and force a new island to be created.

Another reason to restart on the first day is if you don’t like the villagers on your island. By restarting and creating a whole new island, you might find that you end up with new villagers, including ones you prefer.

To restart Animal Crossing: New Horizons during the initial setup, close the game completely by pressing the HOME Button and then pressing X on Animal Crossing: New Horizons. This will give you the option to close the game. If the game hasn’t saved your island yet, doing so will let you go through the island setup again when you relaunch the game.

If the game has already saved your island, this method won’t work, and you’ll need to move on to the next step to delete your Animal Crossing island.

Delete Your Animal Crossing: New Horizons Save Data

Deleting your island on Animal Crossing isn’t as simple as you might think. While you can delete another resident’s home within the game, if you try to follow the same steps to delete your island, Tom Nook will warn you that this isn’t possible within the game, but offers another solution: deleting your entire save data.

Instead of restarting your island from the game itself, you need to completely remove the save data:

1. Press the Nintendo Switch HOME Button.
2. Go to System Settings.
3. Select Data Management.
4. Select Delete Save Data.
5. Select Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
6. Select Delete All Save Data for This Software and confirm that you want to delete the save data.

Of course, this method is permanent, so make sure you’re 100% certain you want to start again. Once you’ve deleted your saved data and restarted your Animal Crossing: New Horizons island, there’s no normal undo option.

Back Up or Transfer Your Animal Crossing: New Horizons Save Data

You can’t transfer Animal Crossing: New Horizons save data to a microSD card. Nintendo Switch save data is stored in the console’s system memory and can’t be copied or saved to a microSD card. On Nintendo Switch 2, save data also can’t be copied to a microSD Express card.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons does have its own island backup feature. If you have an active Nintendo Switch Online membership, you can enable island backup from the game’s settings. This is designed to help recover your island if you lose access to your console or your console is lost, damaged, or replaced. It isn’t a way to keep multiple islands on one console.

If you have another Nintendo Switch or Nintendo Switch 2 console, you can also transfer your entire island to another console using Nintendo’s official transfer process. Once the full island transfer is complete, the island is removed from the original console and becomes available on the new console.

If you’re moving from a Nintendo Switch to a Nintendo Switch 2 as part of a full system transfer, your Animal Crossing: New Horizons island can also be transferred as part of that process.